The Animation programme is a world leader in practice and research, with a commitment to broadening the understanding of our complex discipline. Established over 30 years ago, the programme has an international reputation that places it at the forefront of the discipline. Within the programme, there are three distinct pathways: Documentary Animation, Experimental Animation and Narrative Animation, one of which students select as part of their application.

The programme’s location within a visually sophisticated, multidisciplinary art and design school, rather than a film school, is crucial in the development of creative and critical thinking, research skills and expanded discipline expertise that’s applied to ideas, styles, genres and technological approaches. Both the MA and research degrees attract artists and makers from a broad background of disciplines: science, maths, architecture, literature, art history, computing and fine art, as well as communication.... [-]

Architecture at the RCA sets out to inspire design innovation. The programme expands the possibilities of architecture and its agency in the world by encouraging a speculative, independent and critical ethos among its students. The two-year long programme conceives of architecture as a diverse and complex set of practices that move beyond traditional distinctions and limits in the field. A radical and innovative approach to pedagogy and research, as well as a commitment to an open-minded, experimental studio culture, sets the RCA apart.

For students looking to develop a distinctive and innovative voice in the field and a unique chance to collaborate with future leaders in other art and design disciplines including photography, sculpture, visual communications and animation, the RCA offers an ideal environment.... [-]

The spirit of Ceramics & Glass at the RCA springs from the heart of those media, and a belief in the transformative power of material thinking, research and making to enrich our world in imaginative and meaningful ways. The programme is a site for contemporary discourse where personal concerns and global perspectives intersect. We seek those with a passion to extend the possibilities and perspectives of ceramics and glass within and beyond traditional limitations, informed by their rich provenance of materials and practices.

The Ceramics & Glass MA at the RCA provides outstanding opportunities to develop a dynamic, informed and connected practice in a study environment that embraces diversity and depth. We believe in interrogating practices and challenging conventions.... [-]

With a global urban population of 4 billion and 28 megacities, urban life is experiencing momentous change. New social groups are emerging, populations are ageing, family units are extending and dispersing, work is becoming casualised and whole communities have moved online. At the same time, dangerous new social divides are appearing on the periphery of cities, between different cultures, and now also between different generations.

Many of the models used to explain, design, develop and manage cities have resisted change. More recently however, new possibilities are emerging and their consequences promise to be profound: modern social movements, automated building supply chains, technology platforms, driverless transport and logistics, distributed water and energy infrastructure – all will radically reshape the city's fundamental building blocks.... [-]

The Contemporary Art Practice programme enables us to facilitate a distinct engagement with specific areas of contemporary art practice that exceed the specificity of the well-established disciplines of Arts & Humanities at the Royal College of Art. Contemporary Art Practice engages with contemporary modes of art production, discourse, and display. It facilitates specialization through its pathway structure enabling students to engage with a particular approach to developing their own art practice.

Established 25 years ago and led by Professor Victoria Walsh, the MA Curating Contemporary Art (CCA) programme is recognised both as an international leader in its field and for its commitment to collaborative group project-based work that integrates theory and practice throughout the two years of the curriculum. New areas of focus in response to the expanded field of curating and the widening professional opportunities for curatorial practice and research in a global context include:

Exhibitions and Programming practice focus on curating, commissioning and programming within the physical and defined setting of the gallery/museum space providing a critical, theoretical and practical understanding of the histories and opportunities within this form of curatorial practice.... [-]

The Design Products programme is about creativity for purpose – educating students to be design leaders, who address real-world challenges through balancing high levels of creativity and technical capability with contextual insight and empathy for people.

The Design Products identity is characterised by a pluralistic approach to designing for purpose through a number of design cultures – Design through Making, Design for Manufacture, Object Mediated Interactions, Design as Catalyst and Exploring Emergent Futures – which are underpinned by a set of contextual and real-world themes. This provides a platform for students to conceptualise and validate ideas by provoking, challenging people, places, things and systems through crafted artefacts. ... [-]

Digital Direction addresses media and storytelling in the digital era, assessing emerging issues associated with contemporary digital communication and the creative economy, training new creative leaders who are responsive to continually changing contexts, infrastructures and technologies and engendering a new wave of creative leadership. Graduates will develop a deep understanding of critical and experimental communication/media production, creation and design practices, and through applied innovation will address current and future contexts.

The programme prepares students to evolve and lead new approaches to media and storytelling through predictive innovation, enabled by rapidly changing cultural and industrial practices, plus uses of, and developments in, digital technologies. Centring on the interrelated domains of broadcasting, film and experience/brand, the programme addresses knowledge and skills gaps in four key areas of practice: production, direction, content development/making/writing and communication/digital media design.... [-]

The intensity of our carbon economy has left the planet with a design problem. No matter where we live or work, the environments we move through are constructed. There is nothing on the planet that human beings haven’t touched. If the planet has a design problem, what do the terms ‘design’ or ‘architecture’ mean when they are applied to phenomena as varied as oceans or atmospheres, or to farmland and deserts?

The intensity of environmental change calls for new forms of knowledge production based on propositional thinking, especially design-based methods. The design is a crucial tool in both the imagination and negotiation of alternative futures.

Environmental Architecture is a 15-month, project-based MA programme exploring the future of landscapes, environments and ecosystems. It focusses on the co-dependence of life forms and earth systems as well as the co-existence of alternative concepts of landscapes, environments and ecosystems as they are expressed by different societies. The programme is field-focused. Students will have the opportunity to engage with live projects in sites of rapid and complex environmental change. The programme emphasises comparative, multi-scalar approaches to design research. Students will familiarise themselves with anthropological and ethnographic research methods, and new systems measuring, classifying and capturing data including computational sensing and imaging. Classes and workshops from experts in physical and social sciences complement studio teaching and provide quantitative input to projects as required.... [-]

A fearless approach to creative expression, fanatical technique and an informed professionalism is what we look for and encourage on this programme. The focus is towards strengthening this spirit of exploration through unique expertise and a polymathic debate with modern global awareness. We further encourage a strong work ethic across a broad variety of personally driven, industry-oriented and cross-programme design projects. The realisation of individuality within a global design context is enabled through our excellent links with practising designers, international fashion houses, cross-programme relations and a dedicated staff team.

New ideas, materials, methods and design applications are continually originated and progressed by our students. Fashion staff endeavour to create a course environment directed towards this creative self-discovery, one that offers each student both the conceptual tutelage and technical guidance to achieve their 3D design objectives.... [-]

IED is set within the vibrantly mixed studios of the RCA’s School of Communication, each of its pathways with a specialist Lab as its hub. Professor Neville Brody, who provides inspiration and instigation, calls IED an interface between information and experience, and a platform for exploring post-screen, post-digital and post-disciplinary practice. Our students and researchers work alongside the School’s graphic designers, animators and illustrators, and in interdisciplinary teams with other RCA programmes as well as external scientists, companies, architects and academics.

IED develops a mindset as well as a skillset. No specific technical skills are required; applicants come from diverse backgrounds in design, science, fine art, engineering and technology, with a common critical interest in data, design and making. Graduates may go on to work in visualisation, data science, advanced design practice, cultural and educational institutions, research labs or studio practice.... [-]

MA Intelligent Mobility succeeds the RCA’s previous MA Vehicle Design. The programme launched in 2017/18 alongside the Intelligent Mobility Lab, a new multidisciplinary research centre dedicated to the future of transportation design, systems and urban mobility, led by Director and inaugural Chair in Intelligent Mobility Professor Dale Harrow. MA Intelligent Mobility aims to place the RCA in the vanguard of the ‘third age’ of automotive design.

The MA Intelligent Mobility programme will comprise two distinct specialisms: Automotive Transitions and Urban Mobility. Automotive Transitions students will focus on using design thinking to develop innovative forms of transportation, such as autonomous vehicles. Urban Mobility students will focus on designing the systems and frameworks that enable people to move through hyper-connected cities. The programme will also acknowledge and explore solutions for the 80 per cent of people in developing or emerging economies who do not have access to transport. ... [-]

Jewellery & Metal (J&M) forms part of the School of Material. Within this context, we are committed to exploring the rich and diverse field of adornment and object culture. We encourage an open-minded approach that in principle embraces all materials. But it is metal that constitutes the technological core of our subject and we believe that a deepening understanding of the metal elements is key in these developments; the Periodic Table is our reference in expanding our activity within the subjects of jewellery and metalwork.

The attitude of Jewellery & Metal has shifted from a purely object-centred focus to a wider scope, questioning and exploring issues centred on the human condition. We are responsive to the rapidly changing social and cultural landscape and draw on history and technology in nurturing intellectual and creative skills directed at understanding and pushing forward jewellery and objects of human making. The rich and extensive bodies of knowledge associated with object-making and jewellery underpin an approach that is outward-looking, open to the wider discourse on commodity objects, connecting to contemporary life.... [-]

The MA Interior Design programme engages its participants in exploring emergent ideas and issues concerning distinct aspects of the design of the interior. This incorporates research, practice and making work that explores the diversity of human occupation in numerous environments, extending from the room to the city. The programme encourages the view that the interior is an interface between its occupants and the built environment and it supports the notion that the interior is an agent for social change.

The programme values speculation, analysis, rigour and provocation with regards to the thinking and making of all aspects of the design of the interior. It challenges its participants to formulate their own rigorous critically independent responses to these fundamental concerns. This is often undertaken via the reworking of existing structures, the creation of temporal installations and the formation of permanent interventions, all involving the construction and communication of particular spatial identities using space, objects and materials.... [-]

The Painting programme approaches the practice of painting as a self-reflexive, critical activity that draws on a wealth of varied historical, material and conceptual accomplishments related to the medium and its objects. The programme aims to provide an expansive and inclusive platform on which to engage with current issues and debates surrounding the challenges and location of painting as a part of contemporary art practice.

Through the many learning and teaching experiences the programme offers, students and staff rigorously, critically and supportively engage in personal tutorials, group critiques and presentations. These discussions and critical forums take place in the Painting studios, across the College, through visits to galleries and collaborations with our partner institutions, and during visits to major exhibitions both in this country and abroad.... [-]

Led by Professor Jo Stockham, the Print programme is a two-year specialist MA course. Renamed from Printmaking in 2015, this change signals that the study of the expanded field of Print is equal to the making of prints as a series of medium-specific choices. We explore the mediated image approached through a range of intellectual approaches provided by a diverse team of tutors, all practising artists.

Access to world-class technical facilities in all print media means that we are able to both explore and expand the field of Print addressing the constant interplay between thinking and making, the image and technology. Students from a wide variety of backgrounds choose to study with us because of their interest in questions, which include, the nature of the copy, diagramming, appropriation, the materiality of the image, the politics of print and print as a collaborative practice.... [-]

Led by Reader in Time-based Media Jordan Baseman, the Sculpture programme establishes a framework that encompasses the material, historical and theoretical conditions of sculpture where students are supported to develop their own practice.

Sculpture includes object-making, public art and social practices, site and space, performance, sound, film and video: but rather than consider the specific manifestations of sculpture we prefer to think of our position as a methodology from which to progress the production of art.

The Sculpture programme provides a structure that incorporates both individual and group tutorials, as well as a dedicated seminar programme. Critical reviews of student work are conducted consistently throughout the year, at the end of each term and we invite external visitors to contribute to these discussions when they become School-wide. Our students are eager, determined, inquisitive, ambitious – actively defining their own terms in regards to the ideas and actualities of Sculpture.... [-]

Service Design has become the new frontier for designers who want to make a difference at scale, and in so doing advance the discipline of design. The service sector represents almost 80 percent of the advanced economies, and in recent years the role of design in transforming both public and private sector services has become widely recognised. The programme at the Royal College of Art is the leading specialist service design programme worldwide and with around 80 students and researchers and 10–12 live projects at any time, it’s almost certainly the largest dedicated service design studio globally.

Students emerging from the programme are finding immediate employment as service designers as industry and governments seek to transform their customer and citizen experience. We’ve just enhanced our programme by creating three new platforms for service design. The first is Service Innovation, which focuses on developing citizen and customer-centric solutions to address immediate social, cultural and economic challenges. The second, Envision, not only speculates on the future of healthcare, education, retail, banking, transportation, but uses future forecasting techniques for society, culture and technology to design service experiences for the next decade and beyond. The final platform, Public Service and Policy, brings together social and political science with design to transform public service provision as well as government policy... [-]

Textiles offer uniquely fluid, flexible and infinitely adaptable ways of questioning, examining and solving the some of the societal challenges that face us. This powerful agency is more valuable and vital than ever before as these challenges become increasingly complex.

Textiles at the RCA is a multi-faceted discipline and our staff and students work at the creative interface between materials, making and meaning. Our focus is innovation that impacts and spans across many sectors exploring new territories for the twenty-first-century Textiles specialist.

New materials, new ways of making and new ways of experiencing our man-made world require us to constantly reconsider and question our activities, generating a culture of creative restlessness throughout the activities of the programme, which include 4* research, a growing PGR community and a dynamic masters course.... [-]

The V&A/RCA History of Design programme is internationally recognised as the leading centre for the postgraduate study of the history of design and material culture. As jointly offered by two world-leading centres for scholarship and creativity, the RCA and the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A), we teach and research cultural, social, economic, political and technological history through artefacts and our interactions with them. Projects and expertise range across global geographies, from the early fifteenth century to the present day.

For 2018/9, we are offering three pathways within the MA: design and material culture; performance and photography.

V&A/RCA History of Design is based on the principle that researching, analysing and communicating history through artefacts is a practice-based discipline and can play an important public role. We embrace the history that is public-facing, experimental and committed to scholarly excellence, as befits our location in the public museum and the art school. We bring a distinctly global outlook to historical questions, whether this means placing local histories in comparative context or tracing global networks through material culture.... [-]

Visual Communication as a discipline is undergoing a major shift in both its vocational positioning and intellectual relevance. At the Royal College of Art, the programme has a long history that has radically examined the place of visual communication in relation to culture and society, while championing the importance of an interdisciplinary approach. The programme offers three pathways of study: Experimental Communication, Graphic Design and Illustration.

The pathways are interrelated and structured around the discipline of visual communication to facilitate well-informed risk-taking and experimentation from a grounded position of subject knowledge and understanding. Pathways are delivered in subject clusters (critical thinking) supported by shared workshops (critical making) and delivered by staff who are either advanced practitioners or active researchers engaged in both the core and margins of communication practice.... [-]

The MA Writing programme in the School of Arts & Humanities provides unique opportunities for postgraduate students to develop high-level writing, research and analytical skills in the setting of one of the world’s most dynamic art schools. Combining workshop models of teaching and learning, and ‘live’ projects with leading arts organisations, the MA provides the skills required for a successful career in the arts or a research degree. For 2018/19, we are introducing some exciting new areas of specialisation within the programme.

The programme is committed to the idea that writing – of all kinds – is a creative practice that requires imagination as well as good literary skills and expert knowledge. Students on the MA are presented with many opportunities to develop and apply the skills required by various writing formats from the review and catalogue essay to fiction and other forms of speculation. The unique structure of the programme allows for specialisation and the freedom to explore novel approaches to writing.... [-]

Global Innovation Design (GID) is a joint Master's programme between the Royal College of Art and Imperial College London. It is a unique, transnational Master’s design initiative that brings together three major centres of design, culture, enterprise and industry: Europe, North America and Asia.

GID is a multidisciplinary, multicultural and multinational design programme awarding both an MA from the Royal College of Art and an MSc from Imperial College London to graduates. GID offers an engaging global curriculum and provides powerful cultural experiences crafted to nurture innovators and designers who are prepared to take on the changing needs of the enterprise in the twenty-first century.... [-]

Innovation Design Engineering (IDE) is a double Masters that has been run jointly with Imperial College London for over 35 years. It is a leading-edge, creative product development course that involves experimentation, design, engineering and enterprise activities. In multidisciplinary teams or as individuals, participants work at the centre of the complex, demanding projects with an emphasis on prototyping and proving propositions. The programme is external facing and encourages all to tackle important real-world issues involving advanced technical, design and social parameters. We believe that design is a verb, not a noun.

MRes RCA degrees are offered in four Schools (Communication, Design, Fine Art and Humanities) and are designed to provide early-career researchers with the intellectual, technical and professional tools with which to complete high-quality research projects, whether at doctoral level or within the cultural and creative industries, working across traditional sociocultural, disciplinary and sectoral boundaries.

MRes RCA programmes are delivered through a combination of: structured learning, comprising of lectures and master-classes by practitioners and senior academics; workshop classes based around a set task (a ‘brief’); tutor-led seminar classes where students will be asked to reflect on material that they have read or studied in advance; and project assignments that support the structured teaching programme. Students are taught by highly regarded and active practitioners who are also academically qualified to provide a critical context for their work.... [-]